Pencil Storm salutes Mike Parks and Jim Johnson in this Rock & Roll Birthday Week Saturday Night Special set of reprints. Mike & Jim’s birthdays fall one day apart (January 27th & 28th, respectively), cementing their bond as musical brothers-in-arms. Jim is alive & well, drumming in The Beatdowns. We lost Mike in 2018, and I believe he is is somewhere in the cosmos, likely rocking licks with Chuck Berry, Jimi Hendrix, Fred “Sonic” Smith, and any 1960’s garage-band guitarist with a fuzzbox & a bone to pick with society. Mike would have been 74 last Monday, Jim turned 73 on Tuesday, so tonight we’re posting links to our favorite Pencil Storm re-runs featuring these master musicians. Following those are some additional videos that weren’t embedded in the blogs.
Happy birthday, gentlemen.
from January 27th, 2014, on Mike’s 63rd birthday…..
MIKE PARKS - GUITAR SLINGER by Ricki C.
from January 7th, 2020, two years after Mike’s passing…..
MIKE PARKS - GUITAR SLINGER CONTINUED 2020 by Ricki C. & Jim Johnson
from January 7th, 2021, Mike’s third memorial year…..
from January 30th, 2021 (reprinted from 2016)…..
THE PENCIL STORM INTERVIEW: JIM JOHNSON by Colin Gawel
and now, some videos for your rock & roll Saturday Night Special…..
(BTW - Would I give anything for videos of Mike & Jim in Willie Phoenix & the True Soul Rockers on YouTube? You’d best believe I would.)
Ricki C. is 72 years old and has two dresser drawers full of black rock & roll t-shirts, which he wears incessantly. He also has a hand-tooled leather hippie belt from 1972 that still fits. He has congestive heart failure and prostate cancer and KNOWS that all this rock & roll nonsense has to stop someday.
But not yet.